A candid, subtly profound collection.
Franklin (English/Brigham Young Univ.) meditates on the nature of manhood by reflecting on his life as a married father of three boys.
In this warm, engaging collection of 14 personal essays, the author offers a masculine take on love, commitment, parenthood, and living contentedly in an imperfect world. He opens with a reflection on kissing, its association with “bases, bats, and balls,” and the “sliding, stealing, and striking out” associated with the male world of baseball. But for Franklin, kissing is a far more complex act than this misogynistic metaphor suggests. It can not only express affection, but also signify everything from transcendent romance to animal lust. Life as a married man has shown him that love goes beyond mere physical attachment to an object of desire. In “Working at Wendy’s,” Franklin tells the story of a temporary job he took at a fast-food restaurant to support the needs of his college-going wife and their young son. Though humble, the job provided “an honest wage” for his family while revealing just how privileged his education had made him. While growing into manhood provided Franklin with lessons on the importance of putting others before himself, it also revealed the futility of equating masculinity with outward physical attributes like hair. A balding Franklin now teaches his sons to enjoy what they have “while it lasts” rather than hold onto it too tightly. Patience, tolerance, and humor are also essential to the modern man. “Houseguests” is the author’s witty account of his ongoing battle against the roaches he sees as the true owners of his family dream home. Franklin’s focus on daily life makes his book down to earth and entirely accessible. Taken together, his essays reveal the ways men can not only survive their own socialization, but also take quiet pleasure and pride in being male.
A candid, subtly profound collection.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7844-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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